4 Proven Ways a CRM for Retail Business Helps SMEs Grow

Saphyte Team

4 min read

Updated: November 22nd, 2020

A CRM for retail business can go a long way in many companies. With a little investment, technology can enhance employee productivity, improve customer satisfaction and customer retention, and increase sales through repeat purchases.

A CRM software is developed to do away with manual tracking of data and recording them in boring spreadsheets. When used properly, a CRM can make a company more dynamic and engaging with potential customers and existing ones.

In fact, according to a study by HubSpot, CRM tools are among the top 3 technologies used by companies to create personalized interactions with customers. HubSpot also reported that 54% of marketers feel empowered to collaborate with their teams when using CRM— team collaboration is a business aspect that is becoming more important these days as teams have started working remotely.

What is a CRM for retail businesses

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software designed to help its user manage data and information. It is mostly used to collect and organize data from potential customers, as well as existing ones.

When a CRM is designed for retail businesses, it takes into account the unique needs of a retail business and the typical interactions between the retail business and its customers in the industry. Retail businesses are often B2C businesses — or Business to Customers, which means they interact with individual customers more than companies or organizations.

A CRM for retail business is usually designed to accommodate huge amounts of data, as customers tend to be in numbers in B2C businesses. This is also useful and important as the accommodation of leads and customers are necessary for the business to grow its sales.

The CRM can also have tools designed to help the business promote its products and services to leads and customers. It can make use of drip email marketing as a strategy, for example, to continuously engage customers, guide leads into making their first purchase, and encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases over and over again.

This strategy is important because, according to research, 80% of a business’s sales can come from only 20% of its customer base. More than that, it also costs more to acquire new leads than to sustain and grow the business relationship with existing customers.

Ways for a CRM to Help SMEs Grow

Here are the proven ways a CRM can help SMEs engaged in retail grow:

Improved Lead Acquisition 

A typical business requires generating leads (or potential customers) to have sales in the end. Leads start as strangers to the company. They have no idea how the company works, what its products and services are, and if the company can provide value to their lives on the long run. 

Here, it is extremely important that the lead is provided sufficient information to entice them to know the company more. But acquiring them can be difficult, especially when you’re conducting your marketing online.

Some companies offer lead generation services, like providing you a set of email addresses that you can contact or send your content to. But this is discouraged as some customers are very particular about their privacy and may even find it offensive to have their email address taken from them without their consent.

So to make lead generation more organic, businesses can drop a form on their respective websites for their visitors to fill out. These forms may gather information about a customer’s name, address, contact number, email address, and other relevant information that the business may want to get from their customers.

A CRM may be used here to migrate all the information the website form has gathered into the CRM database. The CRM may then organize the customer data systematically for the benefit of its user. 

A CRM can improve the way lead acquisition works as it makes everything easier and “automatic.” Less manual work for the sales team can mean lesser costs and more time and energy to do the more productive tasks.

Improved Customer Service

A CRM can help businesses personalize their interaction with their leads and customers. Here’s how it works: with a CRM, a user can track all the interaction the business has made with a particular lead or customer right from the touchpoint.

With the information it has gathered from the start, it can help the user to determine the flow needed for the customer. “Does the lead want more information about a particular product or service?” or “Does the lead want a demo right away?” “Has this customer made a purchase before and may want to make a purchase again?”

These are the questions you may want to ask when referring to a customer during the buyer’s journey. When you are able to determine the needs and preferences of a customer, and when you have all the necessary information and records of a customer, it helps you customize your approach with a lead or customer and make it more personalized. 

In short, it eliminates redundant actions which may annoy the customer, helping you improve your customer service.

Grow Your Sales

When you are able to guide your leads’ journey into making their first purchase well, with your sales team being empowered to make data-driven decisions with all the necessary information at their disposal, your sales will inevitably grow.

This article has consistently pointed out the power of a personalized service — when you are able to give your customers what they want (or what they don’t know they need), customer satisfaction will increase. 

This will not just encourage them to make repeat purchases in the future (which will grow your sales as well), but this will also increase the chances that your business will be recommended to others. 

When there’s word-of-mouth communication, leads will start to pour in and with the help of a CRM, managing your leads and converting them into customers will no longer be a problem.

Improves Customer Engagement

With the changes occurring from time-to-time in the business environment, your customers’ behavior and buying patterns will inevitably change as well. Customer engagement will be defined and redefined by the trends in the market, as well as by its disruptions.

For example, the COVID-19 Pandemic has caused a decrease in global consumer spending. It has also changed the way customers interact with businesses – with the former preferring digital transactions more to avoid physical contact.

Customers will now rely on the businesses’ capacity to engage with them digitally. Their digital experience will also define your brand and the experience will dictate whether they will buy from you again in the future or not.

CRM ensures that anything data-related (any data that you have gathered across all your interactions in all your online channels) are properly stored, organized, and reported to you in real-time, so you can make data-driven sales and marketing decisions right away.

A CRM can also allow you to make promotional content based on the gathered data from your customers (like their contact information and inputs from your sales team) through drip marketing, an effortless way to guarantee increased sales and customer satisfaction.

Using Saphyte, a cloud-based CRM designed for retail businesses, here’s how you can perform drip marketing:

Setting up your drip email marketing with Saphyte 

Create a new workflow with the delay node and edit and make any changes. The delay node can be edited but any change might affect the waiting of contacts.

Scenarios:

1) If you have an active workflow with a delay node, edit and save its changes and you will be prompted with 2 options: 

– *Apply to all contacts waiting*, this will make all contacts to be rescheduled and resume until the soonest available date.

– *Apply only new contacts who meet the triggered criteria*,  this means all contacts that were waiting before will be canceled and will resume to the next action.

2) If you choose the option Apply to all contacts, all contacts that were on the waiting list should be rescheduled accordingly. 

3) If you edit it to make a longer date, that means that all contacts who were waiting will be rescheduled at a future date or time. To meet the new length.

4) If contacts haven’t passed the date and are close to meet the criteria, they will be rescheduled to wait less time and resume as soon as they meet the day/time. (Edit to Shorter delay time.)

5) If it was edited to be a day or time in the past, then all contacts waiting in the queue will automatically exit the delay and continue to the next action.

6) If the delay is edited to the current day (today) that means that all contacts will exit immediately the delay and continue to the next action.

About Saphyte

When looking for a CRM solution, choose Saphyte.

Saphyte helps you manage your customer information so you can make phone calls, send emails, manage your marketing campaigns, and leads gathered from your social media in one platform.

Whether you’re a small business or not, Saphyte is guaranteed to help you grow by making your day-to-day sales process more efficient and lets your sales cycle become shorter.

For more information about this technological solution, contact our support team now.